Comment: Love in the age of deep irony, or why Christy Wampole should leave hipsters alone

If you’re the kind of person who urinates blood every time a twentysomething on a fixed gear whizzes past on their way to buy moustache wax, might I recommend Christy Wampole’s get-off-my-lawn screed about how misguided those hipster kids are, cleverly disguised as mushy hand-wringing about our ironic age.

Wampole, for those of you who don’t want to wade through whining about youngsters’ fashion sense, is a Princeton professor who evidently does not leave campus much; her essay, which also ran on the front page of the New York Times‘ Sunday Review section, is a lament for our supposedly ironic age, where no one can be sincere and the kids have their Instagram and wasn’t my cohort of aimless twentysomethings just so much more enlightened than these unwashed youth?

Now, ostensibly the whole hating-on-hipsters thing is just a framing device — she even includes some self-righteousness about how the hipster is merely a mirror for all of middle-class whitedom, like she isn’t also the one yelling at them for wearing those goddamn insincere t-shirts — but spitting at youth is what Wampole is really good at here. Outside of tight-shorted Brooklynites, her main example of the crushing irony under which we all live is self-aware advertising. Now, the fact that advertising needs to hide in a self-defeated shell (which is essentially the only purpose of irony, per Wampole) certainly could represent that this cohort “acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful,” true, though it could also represent the basic media literacy of a generation (if not two or three) that has been blitzed by advertising from the moment of first consciousness, and is somewhat less likely to go a guzzle a Coke just because a pan-ethnic child choir is singing about buying us one.

Actually, if I may kneecap my own large-scale cultural pronouncement here, it’s also worth noting that for every second of self-aware commercial time there are roughly 29 seconds of bald-faced, sincere, consumerist shilling. The fact that the vast majority of society isn’t actually ironic at all — I mean, seriously, Wampole’s country just went through a pitched-battle election that was nine solid months of painfully sincere, if sometimes cynical, haranguing — hangs over this whole essay like an expectant buzzard waiting for it to realize it no longer has a point.

Perhaps if Wampole was capable of looking past the parts of culture that were trying to sell us other parts, this would become clearer. Take a look at, to choose a medium at random, television: look at this ratings chart. What among the shows is even passingly ironic? Actually, the fact a football game is at the top of the list brings up another good point: Sports, so prevalent in our society as to almost be a driving force (at least when it comes to that ultimate of cultural barometers, advertising), is so irony-free as to make you suspect brain death.

People are people: they are all looking for some sense of fulfillment, and it just so happens that today’s crop finds it in pressing seven-inches and trying harder than necessary to get a bike up a hill

The definitive cultural experiences of the Millenial generation — the ’80s and ’90s-born kids who are wearing all those goddamn oversize frames you’re all so annoyed by — are so fulsomely sincere they are occasionally hamstrung by it: Harry Potter, Twilight, The Dark Knight trilogy, Arcade Fire, Skrillex — these are the works of withering ironists unable to stand up and say what they mean?

Things don’t actually get much better if you narrow it down to hipster-approved culture, either — there is Community, and what have you, but read Pitchfork sometime and try to say with a straight face that that whole scene’s problem is that they’re not sincere enough — but then of course even referring to (non-advertising) culture is part of the problem: why, talking with a lot of pop-cultural references is one of the ways you can tell someone is being ironic! Never mind that like a third of our metaphorical expressions can be traced directly to Shakespeare: Referencing culture that exists at least partially to serve as a reflection of the society it was created in is apparently the mark of the frivolous and those afraid to stand up and be counted. Yes, even if you really, sincerely like that culture. Don’t be stupid.

And so even though Wampole turns this whole thing back on to herself (because of course cultural critics have to have long inquisitions into their personal habits these days; this is not an age of irony, it is one of rampant self-regard), it all reads facile. Possibly her inability to buy non-kitschy gifts for her pals’ birthdays is a mark of the Deep Irony in which we all live, but unless she is also completely incapable of sincere expressions of emotional closeness, it’s probably just that, I don’t know, gift-giving doesn’t mean as much in an era of mass availability.

What seems to be going on a lot more, especially in the case of those young hipsters she freely admits to hating, is that Wampole is mistaking a personal distaste for the downfall of western civilization. And yeah, maybe the whole deep-v with short shorts thing looks a bit stupid, but to see someone not conforming to your particular tastes and just assume they’re doing it for the purpose of taking a piss at culture goes well beyond questionable fashion sense. People are people: they are all looking for some sense of fulfillment, and it just so happens that today’s crop finds it in pressing seven-inches and trying harder than necessary to get a bike up a hill. It’s hardly retreating from the world; if anything, it’s the first awkward steps in it, making your way by rejecting or subverting that has come before you.

And even if we want to assume these kids are just being ironic, well, at least it’s better than the apathetic shrug that Walpole celebrates her slacker generation for making. Irony, whatever its annoyances, takes some understanding to pull off, and it’s often a gateway to sincere creation. The only real attitude problem this generation is facing is that it’s bound to grow up and start writing stodgy, misguided rants about how the generation just below it is ruining the culture.